Ecological functional genomics, dealing with the responses of organisms to their natural environment is confronted with a complex pattern of variation and a large number of confounding environmental factors. For gene expression studies to provide meaningful information on conditions deviating from normal, a baseline or normal operating range (NOR) response needs to be established which indicates how an organism's transcriptome reacts to naturally

This paper presents a framework for optimizing the preference learning process. In many real-world applications in which preference learning is involved the available training data is scarce and obtaining labeled training data is expensive. Fortunately in many of the preference learning situations data is available from multiple subjects. We use the multitask formalism to enhance the individual training data by making use of the preference information

We present an EM-algorithm for the problem of learning preferences with semiparametric models derived from Gaussian processes in the context of multi-task learning. We validate our approach on an audiological data set and show that predictive results for sound quality perception of hearing-impaired subjects, in the context of pairwise comparison experiments, can be improved using a hierarchical model.